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I made a program called VmuGx a long time ago. It was a little editor that allowed you to draw vmu "icons" and save them as the "+.+.+...+.+." deal or bmps. If there isn't a program that already exists that does what you want, I can add a bmp to "+.++.+....+." thingy in like 5 minutes.

My program was released to the public, on thechaosrift.com at least. It's not on the site anymore because I guess no one had a use for it. I'll go ahead and make the enhancement and post a link to it up in here.

In the KOS source, there's an example that loads XPM files onto the VMU LCD. It's located in examples/dreamcast/libdream/lcd.

Here's the thing, though: drawing to the LCD is slow. If you draw the LCD image once, nothing appears on newly-inserted VMUs. If you draw it every frame, your framerate will suffer. Here's my solution (again, anyone can feel free to use this however they want, regardless of the GPL license attached to the DCBlap project): replace the KOS VMU handler with one that sends your icon when the VMU is inserted. You can grab the code here:

This is a modified version of the KOS XPM demo, and it requires modifying your XPM slightly after saving it. All you need to do is remove the color palette information, and stick all the data into 1 string. For an example, see http://svn.c99.org/viewcvs/DCBlap/trunk ... iew=markup

Let me know if you have any questions, I know that file isn't very well commented (ok, not commented at all).

-Sam

Edit: Call dcb_vmu_init(); to initialize the driver and replace the default KOS driver. Then call update_lcds(); during your game loop. This will send the LCD image to any newly-inserted VMUs that haven't already recieved it.

Note: I made that with Win98 so I'm hoping it'll look and work the same on XP. The program had an icon I made for it but it randomly didn't show up on my compoot (can you tell me if it does on yours?).

So, all you have to do is open up the program, go to Options -> Bitmap to VMU. Choose the bmp you want. Then do File -> Save to create a text file containing the "+.+.++.+...." huha. And if you want to use the editor, left click places, right click erases.

I did a pretty simple RAW->XPM convert utility so I could display images in the VMU screen easily... First I create the black/white image I wanted (48x32 pixels) and then saved it as .RAW image. (256 colour palette)